1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally a method of visually interacting with a document by dynamically displaying a fill area in a boundary.
2. Related Art
The designing and constructing of building structures requires highly detailed and annotated construction documents, blueprints, floorplans, engineering drawings, architectural plans, and so forth. In electronic form, these may be generally referred to as documents, and may be generated and manipulated by computer software applications that are specific thereto.
Due to the existence of many different computing platforms having a wide variety of operating systems, application programs, and processing and graphic display capabilities, it has been recognized by those in the art that a device-independent, resolution-independent file format was necessary to facilitate such exchange. In response to this need, the Portable Document Format (PDF), amongst other competing formats, has been developed. The PDF standard is a combination of a number of technologies, including a simplified PostScript interpreter subsystem, a font embedding subsystem, and a storage subsystem. As those in the art will recognize, PostScript is a page description language for generating the layout and the graphics of a document. Further, per the requirements of the PDF storage subsystem, all elements of the document, including text, vector graphics, and raster (bitmap) graphics, collectively referred to herein as graphic elements, are encapsulated into a single file. The graphic elements are not encoded to a specific operating system, software application, or hardware, but are designed to be rendered in the same manner regardless of the specificities relating to the system writing or reading such data. The cross-platform capability of PDF aided in its widespread adoption, and is now a de facto document exchange standard. Although originally proprietary, PDF has been released as an open standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008. Currently, PDF is utilized to encode a wide variety of document types, including those composed largely of text, and those composed largely of vector and raster graphics. Because of its versatility and universality, files in the PDF format are often preferred over more particularized file formats of specific applications. Users in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry often work with very large PDF files.
Material take off (MTO) is a term used in engineering and construction, and refers to a list of materials with quantities, characteristics and/or types that are required to build a designed structure or item. A list of required materials for construction is sometimes referred to as the material take off list (MTOL). This list is generated by analyzing architectural, blueprint, construction or other design documents and determining the materials and their characteristics that are required to accomplish the design. The design documents are annotated with information at various locations about a work location that is used to generate a material take off list. For example, a kitchen location may be annotated with information regarding floor tiles to be used (and may include information regarding area, linear measurements, tile type, tile weight, etc.). The material take off may be used to create a bill of materials. Material take off is not limited to the quantity or amount of required material, but also the weight of the items taken off. This is important in the context of logistics and movement of the required materials. Material take off analysis of design documents is routinely performed to gather the desired information concerning flooring areas and the materials to be used thereat.
There are various software tools and programs that facilitate such material take off analysis. However, these require the user to precisely identify various points about the design document to define a perimeter or border for determining an area or otherwise require user intervention to assist in the identification of portions of a perimeter after a computerized determination of a perimeter is incorrect.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a method of document analysis in comparison to the prior art.